Collecting area: Religion

In the complex history of Quakerism on Nantucket, the Wilburite Nantucket Monthly Meeting of Friends stands out. Separating from the numerically smaller Gurneyites in 1845, the “Otisite” monthly on Nantucket separated again in 1863, drawing away from the Wilburite Sandwich Quarterly Meeting, drawing with them a number of sympathetic Friends on the mainland, particularly in Warwick, R.I. Although worship on the island effectively ended in 1894, the mainland Otisites maintained their separation until 1911. Quaker worship on Nantucket was revived in 1939 and with the reunion of Wilburites and Gurneyites in 1944, the monthly meeting decided to remain independent, joining New England Yearly Meeting only in 1956.

This small, but important collection is centered on the latter years of the Wilburite meeting on Nantucket, during the period of reunification with Gurneyites. The bulk of records for the Nantucket Monthly Meeting (Wilburite) are housed at the Nantucket Historical Association.

During the reunification of New England Friends in 1945, the Narragansett Quarterly Meeting (Wilburite) was formed as a transitional body. Established as a successor to the Rhode Island and Sandwich Quarterly Meeting (Wilburite) in 1944, it was the sole remaining Wilburite Quarterly, overseeing monthly meetings in North Dartmouth, Providence, and South Kingstown (which became Westerly in 1945). In 1951, Narragansett Quarter merged with the Rhode Island Quarterly Meeting.

The sparse collection for this ephemeral body consist solely of financial records maintained by the treasurer.

Beginning in 1972, worship group meetings met in Orland (Maine) in the care of the Midcoast Monthly Meeting. By 1979, the Orland Worship Group was set off as the Narramissic Valley Monthly Meeting. The meeting has been a member of the Vassalboro (Maine) Quarterly Meeting since 1979.

The single folder of records from the Narramissic meeting contains a partially complete set of minutes of monthly meetings from December 1992 to September 1994, lacking Apr, May, Aug and Oct 1993, and Mar 1994, as well as State-of-the-Society reports for 1992, 1993, and one unidentified year. It also contains a written statement of support for same-sex marriage.

New Bedford began meetings for worship in 1772, and was set off from Dartmouth Monthly Meeting in 1792. This meeting was divided by the split of 1845. Members of the Nantucket Monthly Meeting were received in 1867, and from Pembroke Monthly Meeting in 1876. Mattapoisett Monthly Meeting was set off in 1992.

Records for the New Bedford Monthly Meeting include minutes, correspondence and reports, worship and ministry, vital records, financial and property, New Bedford Preparative, and Long Plain Preparative.

Formed during the separation of 1845, the Wilburite monthly meeting in New Bedford, Mass., was active until 1865. A member of Sandwich Quarterly Meeting (Wilburite), its members were joined to Dartmouth Monthly Meeting (Wilburite) after it was laid down.

The records of the New Bedford Monthly Meeting (Wilburite) include comprehensive minutes for both the men’s and women’s meetings, along with records of births, deaths, marriages, and removals.

In 1661, less than a decade after the first Friends arrived in British North America, the precursor to the New England Yearly Meeting was organized as the Rhode Island Yearly Meeting. As one of approximately two dozen yearly meetings in the United States, the NEYM currently comprises eight quarterly meetings and approximately 85 monthlies, which are the basic unit of organization for the Society. Like many Yearly meetings, the NEYM has been diverse in spiritual practice, reflected in a history of separations and reunions. Most famously, Orthodox Friends in New England divided in the 1840s into the increasingly evangelically-oriented Gurneyites, who went by the name Yearly Meeting of Friends for New England (joining Friends United Meeting in 1902), and the Wilburites, sometimes called Conservative Friends. In 1945, the disparate branches formally reunited.

Consolidated beginning in the 1960s, the NEYM collection contains the official records of the New England Yearly Meeting from its founding in the seventeenth century to the present, along with records of most of its constituent Quarterly, Monthly, and Preparative Meetings and records of Quaker schools and trusts. As varied as the Quaker practice they document, these records include minutes of meetings for business; committee records; newsletters, financial records; some personal papers; printed books and serials; and an assortment of photographs, audiovisual materials, microfilm, and electronic records. Of particular note are the vital statistics recorded by the Monthly Meetings, including general information on births, deaths, marriages, membership, and obituaries, and specifically-Quaker information on removals (formal letters written as members moved from one meeting to another), denials, testimonies (beliefs and convictions), and sufferings (penalties suffered by Quakers for following testimonies). The Archives Committee of the NEYM is a partner in records management and on-going documentation of the Meeting and its constituent bodies. The collection also includes several thousand Quaker books and pamphlets, including the libraries of Moses and Obadiah Brown and several individual monthly meetings. The records of most monthly meetings in Maine are held at the Maine Historical Society, while important bodies of records are held at the Newport Historical Society (some Nantucket and Rhode Island Meetings) or at individual Monthly Meetings.

An overview of the NEYM collections and a comprehensive inventory and finding aid prepared by Richard Stattler in 1997 at the Rhode Island Historical Society are available online. Stattler’s inventory includes materials in the NEYM Collection at UMass, as well as NEYM materials held at other institutions. SCUA’s updated inventory will follow in 2017.

During the early twentieth century, the library at the Moses Brown School (formerly the Friends Boarding School) became an informal repository for Quaker manuscripts reflecting the history and work of the Society of Friends. Most of these materials were later transferred for custody to the school’s governing body, the New England Yearly Meeting of Friends.

This miscellaneous assortment of letters was apparently set aside by the staff at the Moses Brown School due to their historical content and preserved in the “vault.” Many of the letters appear to have been retained as good examples of Quaker expression of family and friendly bonds or as documentation about significant periods in Quaker history, particularly the Gurneyite-Wilburite controversy of the 1840s, and several touch on Quaker involvement in the antislavery and peace movements. Of special note are four interesting letters from the Quaker minister and social reformer, Elizabeth Comstock, written during and just after the Civil War; a series of nine lengthy letters from a visiting English minister Isaac Stephenson, traveling through New England meetings; a substantial series of letters from prominent Friend Samuel Boyd Tobey; and three letters from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Sarah F. Tobey regarding attempts to connect Stowe with Alexander T. Stewart in hopes of raising funds for her plans for the education of women.

Doctrinal and cultural disputes roiled the Society of Friends in the United States during the early nineteenth century. While evangelical influence had grown within the majority of meetings in New England since at least the 1820s, resistance to the innovations grew too, culminating in a major separation of meetings in 1844 and 1845. A small, but significant portion of Friends coalesced around a Rhode Island Quaker minister, John Wilbur, a strong critic of the evangelical star Joseph John Gurney, to form a separate New England Yearly Meeting of Friends (Wilburite) in 1845. Although most Wilburite monthly meetings were relatively small and short-lived, three persisted, reuniting with the “larger body” of New England Quakerism in 1945.

The records of the Wilburite New England Yearly Meeting consist of a nearly comprehensive set of minutes, records of ministers and elders, meetings for suffering, and epistles. The records are particularly strong for the period of division in the 1840s and reunion in the 1930s and 1940s. The records of Wilburite quarterly and monthly meetings are described separately.

The Friends meeting in New Haven, Conn., can be traced back to at least 1935, when a worship group there became affiliated with the independent Connectict Valley Association of Friends. With the general reunification of New England Friends in 1944, the Association became the Connecticut Valley Quarterly Meeting, and New Haven becoming a monthly, within the New England Yearly Meeting.

The records of New Haven Monthly Meeting contain a thorough set of minutes from 1940-2010, along with a small stretch of minutes from the worship group in Old Saybrook (1955).

A monthly Quaker meeting affiliated with Connecticut Valley Quarter, New London Friends Meeting began in about 1964, when Hobart Mitchell moved to the area to join the faculty at Mitchell College and gathered together a small cadre of Friends to create an independent worship group. New London Friends were granted status as a monthly meeting in 1966, and secured a meetinghouse of their own in 1985.

The records of New London Friends Meeting consist of an incomplete set of minutes from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s.